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Express News Service
LUCKNOW: As the big battle of ballots, due in 2024, is inching closer, political players have got to the drawing board to chalk out strategy, especially, related to seat-sharing in Uttar Pradesh. Maximum activity is visible in I.N.D.I.A camp as the seats have to be shared among the Samajwadi Party (SP), Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), and the Congress.
Significantly, the SP is playing the leader of the opposition bloc in Uttar Pradesh by virtue of not only being the main opposition party in the UP Assembly with 111 MLAs but also having more MPs (three) in Lok Sabha than the Congress and Jayant Chaudhury-led RLD.
While Congress has just one MP from UP in LS, RLD has no presence in the lower house of Parliament. The Samajwadi Party (SP) is also asserting itself in the role of the alliance leader in the state with chief Akhilesh Yadav saying that his party had made enough sacrifices for the alliance partners in previous general elections and that it would play more of a giver than a seeker in 2024.
As per the highly-placed sources in SP, the party leadership is mulling to spare those 19 seats to the allies on which it had never registered a victory since its inception but the allies had given a better fight in previous elections.
In 2019, the SP contested the Lok Sabha polls by stitching a grand alliance with Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The SP leaders believe that in previous polls, the party had to spare its strongholds like Jaunpur, Mau and Ambedkarnagar to the BSP while keeping with weaker bets like Lucknow and Varanasi for itself. SP had never been able to win either of the two.
“The party, this time, has decided to initially leave those seats which it could never win for the allies,” says a senior SP leader seeking anonymity. These seats include Baghpat, Meerut, Ghaziabad, Noida, Aligarh, Bareilly, Kanpur, Pilibhit, Dhaurhara, Gonda, Basti, Varanasi, Sultanpur, Lucknow, Agra, Mathura and Hathras. Besides, the SP never fields its candidates against Congress in Amethi and Rae Bareli which are the Gandhi family bastions.
However, in the recent past, there had been no encouraging statements either from Congress or the SP about each other over seat sharing. Simultaneously, there is also a buzz about the ongoing deliberations between the Congress and the BSP over the latter’s inclusion in the INDIA bloc.
Moreover, the newly-appointed chief of UP Congress Committee, Ajai Rai has been reiterating from every possible forum that his party was making preparations to contest all the 80 seats of UP. The sources indicate that the RLD has also put forward a demand of at least a dozen seats mostly of western UP for itself. How much SP will spare for the Jat party will be interesting to watch.
LUCKNOW: As the big battle of ballots, due in 2024, is inching closer, political players have got to the drawing board to chalk out strategy, especially, related to seat-sharing in Uttar Pradesh. Maximum activity is visible in I.N.D.I.A camp as the seats have to be shared among the Samajwadi Party (SP), Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), and the Congress.
Significantly, the SP is playing the leader of the opposition bloc in Uttar Pradesh by virtue of not only being the main opposition party in the UP Assembly with 111 MLAs but also having more MPs (three) in Lok Sabha than the Congress and Jayant Chaudhury-led RLD.
While Congress has just one MP from UP in LS, RLD has no presence in the lower house of Parliament. The Samajwadi Party (SP) is also asserting itself in the role of the alliance leader in the state with chief Akhilesh Yadav saying that his party had made enough sacrifices for the alliance partners in previous general elections and that it would play more of a giver than a seeker in 2024.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });
As per the highly-placed sources in SP, the party leadership is mulling to spare those 19 seats to the allies on which it had never registered a victory since its inception but the allies had given a better fight in previous elections.
In 2019, the SP contested the Lok Sabha polls by stitching a grand alliance with Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The SP leaders believe that in previous polls, the party had to spare its strongholds like Jaunpur, Mau and Ambedkarnagar to the BSP while keeping with weaker bets like Lucknow and Varanasi for itself. SP had never been able to win either of the two.
“The party, this time, has decided to initially leave those seats which it could never win for the allies,” says a senior SP leader seeking anonymity. These seats include Baghpat, Meerut, Ghaziabad, Noida, Aligarh, Bareilly, Kanpur, Pilibhit, Dhaurhara, Gonda, Basti, Varanasi, Sultanpur, Lucknow, Agra, Mathura and Hathras. Besides, the SP never fields its candidates against Congress in Amethi and Rae Bareli which are the Gandhi family bastions.
However, in the recent past, there had been no encouraging statements either from Congress or the SP about each other over seat sharing. Simultaneously, there is also a buzz about the ongoing deliberations between the Congress and the BSP over the latter’s inclusion in the INDIA bloc.
Moreover, the newly-appointed chief of UP Congress Committee, Ajai Rai has been reiterating from every possible forum that his party was making preparations to contest all the 80 seats of UP. The sources indicate that the RLD has also put forward a demand of at least a dozen seats mostly of western UP for itself. How much SP will spare for the Jat party will be interesting to watch.
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